Many drugs are now available to be used in the treatment of cancer. However, in many cases the cancer fails to respond to the anti-cancer therapy or its growth and/or metastasis is only slowed. Even when a tumor initially responds to an anti-cancer therapy by decreasing in size or going into remission, the tumor often develops resistance to the drug. For these reasons, there has been a need for new anti-cancer agents and for new drugs which can be used to treat multi-drug resistance cancers.
Certain bis(thio-hydrazide amide) compounds have been described as being significantly cytotoxic to cancer cells, including cancer cells that have become multi-drug resistant, and for enhancing the anti-cancer activity of other anti-cancer agents, such as taxol and taxol analogs (see, e.g., U.S. application Ser. No. 10/758,589, and U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,762,204, and 6,800,660, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference).
These bis(thio-hydrazide amide) are themselves only marginally soluble in water. However, their disalts (as disclosed in U.S. application Ser. No. 11/157,213, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference) show high water solubility and bioavailability. Typically these disalts suffer from long reconstitution times in water, and due to a low glass transition temperature these disalts require specialized lyophilization equipment which increases costs associated with drying these disalts.
Therefore, a need exists for methods which decrease costs associated with drying these disalts and which shorten the reconstitution times of the disalts.